Hi all

I often feel I'm losing faith in humanity but at recent times I was pleased to see some shift towards greener thinking about our planet and interests in vegetarianism and veganism. I'm not looking for any fame, I'm just concerned daddy. I have no personal profit from this other than eventually securing a good future for our children and the next generations.

Please, note this e-mail (written over weekend in my free-time) contains my personal views and experiences, information which I learned from books and internet. Therefore my opinions don't have to necessarily correspond with company views and should be considered as views of an individual.

Also feel free to challenge me or prove me wrong as long as it stays in limits of polite constructive criticism, but note that information in this e-mail is based on scientific evidence, statistical data indications, documentaries and personal stories claimed to be real, which I didn't measure / collect / live myself and therefore can redirect you to the source. There is plenty of links in the end of this e-mail already.

The most common question regarding these topics I answer is why did I become a vegan. There are essentially three main areas which are ethical, environmental and health reasons.

1) Ethical reasons

Humans kill 150 billion land animals annually and the total number including fish is very roughly around a trillion (the number of fish is so high that it is measured in tons instead).

Most people kind of know that meat comes from slaughterhouses, but not everybody has been to one. I have been to a few and can honestly say it's much tougher when seen than when just described in words.

Paul McCartney once said: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”. But we make the walls intentionally opaque because talking about slaughterhouses isn't an appropriate topic for a polite conversation.

Humans go much further though in order to produce food and in seek for profit. Not everybody knows that in egg industry male chickens are ground alive and fully conscious in a big grinder after 12 hours since hatching when their sex is recognised because males don't lay eggs and therefore are considered to be a "waste". Please, do not think for just even a second that it was some isolated incident, no. This is happening now and every day in every egg factory in the UK and in the world, except in some of the factories they instead use gas chambers, suffocating in plastic bags or water with electricity to kill the male chicks. These are all official standards of "humane" slaughter which the laws approve to be fully legal. There is a Wikipedia link below.

The same destiny goes along male baby calves in dairy industry where they are also just "waste" because they don't produce milk. Even in honey industry whole bee hives are often killed after the honey is produced and taken.

If you ask yourself why, then sadly the answer is cynically very simple: It's cheaper. It's cheaper to kill the bees than keeping them alive and having to look after them. It's cheaper to grind the chicks once they hatched than feeding them for longer time.

These are just a few examples of cruelty humans cause to animals. There are many other absolutely common practices with no anaesthesia the such as cutting horns, burning beaks, sterilisation, breaking tails, artificial forcible insemination, skinning alive, burning marks in skin, killing and torturing for fun which itself a whole category ... the full list is virtually endless, not to mention the living conditions.

Also the fact that we love dogs and eat pigs whilst in China they eat dogs doesn't make any sense, especially when it is believed these to animals are equally intelligent and equally suffer.

I often answer to the argument that we are predators so we were meant to kill and eat animals ... I don't think many people would be able to chase their prey down and only few would be able to do the kill (including myself) when necessary. Most people are strongly uncomfortable / disgust with killing animals so justifying the fact we buy chopped animals in supermarkets by any predator-like arguments is completely false. Also science proved that our bodies are from most aspects (teeth, intestines length, skeleton, cardiovascular system) much closer to pure herbivores and the argument we have eyes at front of head to have stereoscopic view like predatory animals doesn't prove anything as there are loads of herbivores with eyes at front which evolved for variety of reasons.

2) Environmental reasons

Recently I read a quote that denying climate change nowadays is like denying gravity.

It is still not so widely known yet though that meat production and agriculture have higher impact on global warming than all transport in the world. One of the reasons is that beside CO2 (carbon-dioxide), meat production causes lot of methane being released to the atmosphere where it has between 20x and 70x higher heat-trapping effect than CO2, depending on the conditions. Methane molecules can stay there for 15-25 years until they react and "convert" to CO2 (and other molecules).

Other part of the problem is that vast majority of deforestation (which also itself strongly contributes to global warming) isn't happening to get wood but to make land for farming animals.

Sometimes I hear questions like "So the earth will be a few degrees warmer, so what?". Unfortunately a few degrees warmer can have quite catastrophic consequences. It has been observed that in such conditions the plankton in the oceans couldn't survive and because being close to the beginning of the food chain, the whole food chain would simply collapse. Not only that we are over-fishing the oceans which are by the way full of plastics, but in such scenario there would be no fish left.

Besides, plankton has also a crucial role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere to the oceans, so without plankton the warming effect would even speed up.

Similar problems would appear on land too where the most endangered species are insects, of course including pollinators, where there are already predictions that many of them will go extinct by 2050.

Even United Nations already concluded in their recent UNEP report that global move to meat and dairy-free diet is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change. Link is below.

3) Health reasons

Did you notice that when you start typing in the google search "dairy and " then the auto-complete combo-box will offer you:

"dairy and acne"
"dairy and egg free cake"
"dairy and inflammation"
"dairy and cancer"
"dairy and mucus"
"dairy and constipation"
"dairy and gluten free diet"

There is a growing evidence of links between meat, dairy, eggs, animal protein in general and various types of cancer, heart diseases, diabetes, osteoporosis, allergies, skin problems, Parkinson’s and other diseases.

Some of the great examples are researches of T. Colin Campbell, PhD - the Big Pharma fighter and author of The China Study and The Whole. Another great book is How Not to Die from Michael Greger, MD.

In these books you can find some really interesting information such as why our body / blood stream needs to be alkalic whilst animal protein, especially casein in milk causes it to go acidic, highly increasing risks of cancer cell growth. You can google these things and see this problem is nowadays well known.

It also nicely explains the myth about milk being a good source of calcium because the acidity causes our bodies to try to neutralise it by releasing calcium from our bones. These are just tiny bits from those books which contain far much more interesting info that I can hardly explain in a few sentences. Yet these books are just fragment of what can be found on internet these days.

Sometimes I'm told "but hang on, even if we cannot absorb the calcium we need milk to get protein". You don't have to be a nutritionist to realise we don't need milk at all as soon as you realise two simple things: 1) We are the only species that consume mother milk of other species ... and 2) Domestication of cattle is dated to around 12000 years ago where before that humans didn't drink any milk at all. There is also a common myth that there are some types of cows which produce milk "by default" whilst the truth is all cows like all mammal females need to be pregnant first to have milk, hence the calf "waste". Also there are many lactose intolerance people who simply never drink milk in their lives as they get strong allergic reactions.

Btw. It's a common myth that protein is only in animal products whilst there are loads fruit and vegetables which are a great source of protein.

Additionally what sense does it make to consume mother milk of cows. Why not horse milk, why not dogs milk, or pigs milk, giraffe milk. Why not milk of chimpanzees who are genetically our much closer relatives than cows and goats. In some recent survey I found, people answered that drinking milk of human mums feels "weird" to them, but cow's milk is normal.

Luckily enough there are plenty of cheap and healthy alternatives such as: almond milk, hazelnut milk, oat milk, soy milk, rice milk, coconut milk, cashew milk and other really tasty and healthy products.

Regarding food in general I've never had so much variety of choices when I ate meat, eggs and dairy, because I didn't know about the other stuff and honestly I also didn't care so much. And don't get me wrong, there are vegan foods which I don't like, but overall there are great products on the market nowadays such as many different types and brands of sausages, salami, cheese, tofu, tempeh, seitan, spread, pâté, soy meat, yogurts, vegan eggs, dressings, pizza, ready-to-go meals ... you name it.

Also the stereotypes that vegans are just weird skinny hippies who eat only grass are totally false. Veganism becomes hugely popular in body-building, martial art / sports, the tennis sisters Venus and Serena Williams are vegans, Brendan Brazier (Canadian former endurance athlete), David Haye (heavyweight champion boxer), there are vegans in American football, rugby and sports where you don't really see skinny hippies.

There are apparently over half million vegans in the UK and the number is growing very rapidly.

I don't expect you to go vegan after reading one e-mail from some "weirdo", that would be lack of critical thinking (my journey from meat over vegetarianism to veganism also took a while and I had a long denial stage), but I would be happy if you watched and read some of the following links and gave it a try. If you don't believe something then google it, question it, doubt it, but please, don't ignore it.

And yes, I also used to eat meat, eggs and cheese in the past and I loved the taste of it (I even used to kill animals myself for meat when I was 15 and lived in a village), but at some point I realised I can no longer be part of all this and that my comfort zone of taste is no match to cruelty and destroying the planet.

If you want more information, let me know by either replying to this e-mail or find me on facebook using my name and surname. I will either sign off and respond to your e-mail or will talk to you on facebook in the evening.

There are also plenty of vegan groups on facebook where people are very helpful so you could hear views of others too.

These are the links which will give you much more detailed explanation of all the issues above:

How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic: Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming:

http://grist.org/series/skeptics/#Scientific

Earthlings: Warning! This one contains all the cruelty live recordings, so may be really upsetting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOZm9CBbCR4&list=PLv7whYPHSlwTVb06qz0XrrLikH40cGdhs

Chick culling Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

James Aspey and his cool speech about veganism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHOcox2lvQo

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret - interesting documentary about impact of meat production and agriculture on our planet and why the big companies are almost unbeatable as people can get even killed when going against them:

http://documentary-movie.com/cowspiracy-the-sustainability-secret/

Are we omnivores, herbivores or carnivores?

http://meatyourfuture.com/2015/09/herbivores-carnivores/

Forks Over Knives - great documentary film about impacts of typical western diet on our health, how corrupt the food system is and how plant-based diet can reverse serious diseases:

http://cosmosdocumentaries3.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/forks-over-knives-documentary-film.html

Got 'the facts on' Milk?? - really interesting one about dairy versus health and the profit-driven misinformation from dairy industry:

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v44974566WegGj5Cc

Patrik Baboumian the vegan Armenian-German strongman and his "lack" :) of protein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=208cKULbE2c

As some people didn't want to believe how gummy sweets are made:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/how-gummy-sweets-really-made-8758668?ICID=FB_mirror_main

Incredible story about milk - expert speech about milk influence on our body and how casein triggers cancer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-PQCCiw_Zs

United Nations urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet, with PDF links to the reports:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat-free-diet

Methane vs. Carbon Dioxide: A Greenhouse Gas Showdown - one about those two gases and plenty of links on the page to other related articles:

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-carbon-dioxide-a-greenhouse-gas-showdown/

23 Fruits Highest in Protein:

https://www.healthaliciousness.com/articles/fruits-high-in-protein.php

Animal vs. Plant Protein:

http://nutritionstudies.org/animal-vs-plant-protein/

Loads of articles of Union of Concerned Scientists on climate change:

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming#.V8ylfWBriHs

Nasa: Earth is warming at a pace 'unprecedented in 1,000 years':

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/30/nasa-climate-change-warning-earth-temperature-warming?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

To those I love who still eat animals:

https://medium.com/the-philadelphia-liberationist/to-those-i-love-who-still-eat-animals-9f97abdc3523#.cfeh45e55

Dear Vegans: Can't You Take a Joke? - really good one explaining the stereotypes about vegans and why they are often unreasonably confronted:

http://www.eatplantsdrinkbeer.com/readup/2016/5/28/dear-vegans-cant-you-take-a-joke

Factory-farmed bees:

http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalreports/honey/beewelfareandhoney.aspx

"Some 542,000 people aged 15 or over – more than one per cent of the population – have adopted a plant-based diet, up from 150,000 in 2006. " ... in the UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/news/number-of-vegans-in-britain-rises-by-360-in-10-years/

Failing phytoplankton, failing oxygen: Global warming disaster could suffocate life on planet Earth:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151201094120.htm

NASA on phytoplankton:

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=7187

The Human Predator: Eyes in Front Explored:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upw1st-wqOg

Thanks a lot of you have made it down here, I really appreciate it. I hope you found this information useful and again, in case of any question let me know.

Cheers,
Lukas